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YOSHIKO TAKEBE of Beckett. Indeed, “[t]hose characteristics of Chekhov’s plays including weariness, purposelessness, stagnancy, boredom, going round and round without ever getting to the point all became the elements of Beckett’s drama.”® In contrast, Hirata adapted Chekhov’s The Three Sisters into an android drama by setting its time in the near future, and its place in a provincial city in Japan. Hirata’s The Three Sisters was performed in 2012 not only in Tokyo but also in France and Spain. The nineteenth-century Russian drama was reproduced in the form of an ultramodern, experimental work that transcends the space between drama and science. By including an android as the youngest of the three sisters on the stage, the non-verbal modalities are more emphasized, encouraging the actors and the audience to become more conscious of what it means to be human. As examined by Hirata, an android appears to be a real human being when it is able to embody what scientists call “noises.” When a human being performs an action, extra “noises” or movements such as pauses or breaths occur, which are called “micro-slips” in the field of cognitive psychology. These extra movements should neither add too much nor too little, and good actors are supposed to be able to control them unconsciously.'® In order to create an android that performs these “noises,” Hirata was supported by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a scientist at the forefront of robotics, whose research focuses on androids. They worked together on programming noises at random to enable an android to behave naturally. The tedious, dead-end situation in The Three Sisters was accentuated through the mechanical voices, pauses, and silences of an inorganic android. For the scenes involving the human actors and the android, there was a mixture of live movement and recorded input gestures by the android. As analyzed by Ishiguro, “The human actors developed their attitudes toward the android over the course of rehearsals. They discovered what kind of physical actions they take when they treat the android either as a human or as a non-human. The director also realized through their dialogues that the implementation of an android onto the stage enhances various potentialities for understanding multimodal, multi-layered communication in the theatre.””’ In adaptation, non-verbal modalities play a key role in conveying the original themes and motifs of the source text. As the three women in Come and Go were provided with accurate timings of the pauses and gestures in the original text by Beckett, Japanese Noh conventions (such as stylized pattern 15° Ibid., 105. Oriza Hirata: From Misunderstanding: What is Communication?, Tokyo, Kodansha, 2012, 62-63. Hiroshi Ishiguro: Multimodal Analysis on Android Drama of The Three Sisters: How Humans Interact with Android, The Journal of The Japan Association for Artificial Intelligence Studies, Vol. 29, No.1 (2014), 66-67; my translation. «120 +
